Social capital, human capital, and labour market outcomes

Abstract

This thesis aims to document several aspects pertaining to the dynamics of human
capital, both from a theoretical and an empirical viewpoint.
Chapter 2 studies how informational flows arising from social connections can
affect careers and promotions. It aims to achieve identification of this causal pathway
by focusing on the careers of bishops in the Catholic church. The range of the data,
both in time and in space, makes it possible to infer some types of social connections
between bishops (based on geography and careers), which in turn allows for the
identification of their effect on careers. I find that being connected to the relevant
bishops has a positive and significant effect on the likelihood of promotion to a
diocese.
Chapter 3 investigates the transmission of human capital from one generation
to the next. While the correlation of parents’ educational achievement with that of
their children is strong and well documented, there is a scarcity of consensual evidence
that this relationship has a causal nature. We use a French reform that increased the
duration of compulsory schooling by two years as a natural experiment, providing
exogenous variation in parental years of schooling, and study its effect on the children
of the affected individuals. We find evidence of a strong effect of paternal education
on the educational achievement of children.
Research on employer learning has concentrated on contexts where there is uncertainty
only on either the general or the match-specific human capital of the worker.
Chapter 4 develops a model where general and specific human capital coexist, and
the uncertainty is on their respective shares in total productivity. The model generates
predictions on a number of dimensions, e.g. declining worker mobility with
experience and increase in wage variance over the lifetime.